• Founded: 1994
  • Company size: 50+
  • Industry: Staffing and recruiting

The Bowdoin Group is a healthcare and life sciences-focused search firm at a critical growth inflection point. With complex clients and increasingly sophisticated searches, the firm is reshaping its go-to-market strategy, internal workflows, and how to scale sustainably.

With recruiters speaking to countless new candidates every day, documentation and administrative tasks were consuming time better spent on strategic work. That pressure led them to Metaview as a way to improve consistency, capture information more effectively, and free their team to focus on higher-value contributions.

Scaling efficiency without adding headcount

As a growing firm, Bowdoin faced a familiar scaling dilemma: hire more people, or make existing workflows more efficient. “We’re a scaling organization,” says Vice President of People and Talent Liz Calder. “We're constantly assessing how to gain more efficiency, how to continue to build people's careers, and how to structure our workflow.”

As well as search volume ramping up, Liz’s team was refining its go-to-market strategy, strengthening their brand, and taking on increasingly complex client engagements. 

“We needed to gain efficiency. We needed to be more consistent with our client deliverables. And we needed to capture information quicker, faster, in a more templated way.”

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“We don’t need them spending 80% of their day just trying to keep up with administrative tasks. We’re operating faster. We’re operating with more airtight information. And we're allowing people to focus on the thing that's going to move the needle in their careers.”

The ultimate goal was freeing the team from interruptive administrative work so they could focus on strategic, career-building contributions. And the focus on workflow inefficiencies quickly led them to a core pain point.

“We’ve really assessed their workflow and tried to pull out the areas that they're spending majority of their time on that isn’t building them in their careers. We found that a lot of that is through administrative documents.”

And Metaview proved to be the perfect solution to this common, but major, issue for search firms. 

Reducing administrative overload in high-volume recruiting

Bowdoin operates on a full team-based model, often running complex searches involving multiple stakeholders. “Our recruiters were talking to a new candidate every half an hour from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. You're doing that back to back to back to back to back, capturing the key client mindset, figuring out compensation, thinking through the nuances of candidates. And by the end of the day, it's hard to keep track of all of that.”

This intense velocity and immense volume made capturing quality candidate insights increasingly difficult. 

Metaview’s AI tools remove all the manual effort and deliver structured, high-quality interview notes at this enormous scale. This creates what Liz describes as a “backbone of content.” The team can easily retain critical information without sacrificing focus.

“Our recruiters, our researchers, and those leading our searches…have the backbone of content there in front of them to work with and to apply their strategic value.”

By shifting the documentation grunt work to Metaview, Bowdoin’s recruiters operate with greater clarity and consistency.

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“Metaview enables our team to use their skills that AI can’t replace.”

Enabling impact firm-wide

While interview documentation was the clear and pressing need, Liz wanted to see significant efficiency improvements across the board. “We looked at a tool like Metaview and also recognized that it could impact our whole organization, versus only a specific one department or one function within the firm.”

Metaview stood out for its cross-functional applicability. It quickly became embedded across candidate conversations, client kickoff meetings, and in internal collaboration.

“We’ve encouraged everybody across the firm to limit the amount of physical notetaking they’re doing—not focusing on the conversation that you’re having.”

This broad adoption created shared standards for documentation and information capture, and brought quality and consistency in every interaction.

Elevating client deliverables through structured information

In executive and specialized search, personalized presentation matters. Each client has their own preferences. “We have some that like to be short, sweet, bulleted. We have some that like verbose, executive search-level readouts of candidates.

But that variety also makes consistency difficult, especially with manual documentation. Metaview gave Bowdoin structured data that could flex to different client expectations.

“We’re using the information captured in Metaview to give higher value client deliverables, because you can manipulate the information to be digested by the client per their choice. The tool can work with the different expectations of our clients.”

This not only brings speed, but also greater alignment between captured candidate data and client-facing outputs.

Building a true AI teammate for sourcing creativity

As Bowdoin expanded usage beyond note capture into sourcing workflows, Liz observed something interesting. The system wasn’t just saving time—it was actually sparking creativity and breaking entrenched sourcing habits (like heavy LinkedIn Recruiter use).

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“It gets the team’s creative juices flowing because it's showing more on prompts. You get to input your human thinking and then see what the system hears and feels from that.”

The system is an interactive, enabling thought partner. “They feel like they have an additional teammate in the system that's helping them get creative and think a little bit differently.”

AI isn’t a replacement for the firm’s rich human expertise. It’s an augmentation layer.

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“They feel like they have an additional teammate in the system that's helping them get creative and think a little bit differently.”

Driving cultural change and internal momentum

Perhaps the most meaningful impact of bringing Metaview on board was a cultural shift. Change management in a search firm isn’t simple, and many recruiters are deeply attached to their established processes.

But something different began happening. As adoption grew, team members began volunteering to lead internal training sessions to showcase how Metaview improved their workflow. And further adoption became top-down, led by the hands-on users themselves.

“We’ve got employees volunteering to lead these trainings in a way we’ve not seen in the past. They want to showcase what this has done from an ease perspective in their day-to-day work.”

The long-term goal is to make Metaview a fully embedded part of all key workflows.

“Six months from now, it will be fully part of our workflow and not feel like a choice to use the tool.”

The perfect partner

The other factor that makes change possible at scale is the support and guidance of key vendors. And that’s exactly where a specialized recruiting platform shines. 

“The Metaview team is one of our favorite teams to partner with,” says Liz. “We're a small firm, and we have people very tenured in this business. They are connected to how they do things, and interrupting that can be quite hard. 

“The team took the time to get to know us, and they were always there. They've been right by our side in the journey and given us ideas to continue to implement and to put it in our workflow, but also fix the kinks and hear our feedback when things are frustrating.”

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“I found the Metaview team to be incredibly client centric, and always available. They really helped us incrementally build the skill sets of the team to know how to use the tool and then to feel empowered.” 

“It's been awesome working with the team and being involved in implementing this.”